Breeze Browser Pro vs Capture1 (Sharpening)

No apologies necessary. I may find it funny tomorrow. I probably would have, yesterday...

Scottes wrote:
OK, now I understand.

Generally you don't want to listen to me if you want to do something "easy" in Photoshop.

Easy is good. I like easy. Easy is my favorite of all things. I just kinda, sorta think sharpening in the conventional manner is hard

USM drives me insane. I will say however thus far nik seems to work well but man the price tag has me thinking I should get off my panzy butt and find a way to make CS2 "just work"

tdaugharty wrote:
Easy is good. I like easy. Easy is my favorite of all things. I just kinda, sorta think sharpening in the conventional manner is hard

USM drives me insane. I will say however thus far nik seems to work well but man the price tag has me thinking I should get off my panzy butt and find a way to make CS2 "just work"

Have you tried the TLR Pro Sharpening Kit? Once you get familiar with the settings you can edit the scrpt to run silently (no UI) with your chosen presets, and create an action that can be used to run batches. The scripts are written in Javascript, but they elegantly coded with lots of comments, editing the globals is pretty much self explanetory. If you want to try, and run into to trouble, PM me and I can help you.

USM is easy. Particularly because it's got some easy-to-follow rules, is subjective so you can't screw up too bad, and it's easy to build experience as to what looks good.

General rules of thumb for USM:

Set Threshold to 0 unless you have a noisy image or an image that you want ot keep soft, like a portrait. In either case you can set Threshold to something between 1 and 5, depending on noise or desired softness.

The Radius is a calculation of the output DPI. For prints of 240-360 DPI the Radius should be about 1 - 3 depending on the detail. Finer details get a smaller Radius. Softer images or larger details get a larger Radius. Experience will help a bit here, too, but this will do a good job most of the time.

For the Amount, view at 50% and sharpen until it looks good. Enable & disable Preview to get a before & after, which helps a LOT to see what you're doing, and should be done many times. Now, how much "looks good" is totally subjective. Suffice to say that if you see little change between Preview Off and Preview On then it's not enough. If things look too different - blocky, crunchy, wild changes in blacks & whites - then it's too much. You should be able to see a *noticable* difference between the Before and After, but not an unpleasant difference.

That's it.


Well, that's not really it since you can do many things with USM to improve it, like masks to sharpen only the edges, or to sharpen (just as I described) in LAB mode sharpening only the Lightness channel, sharpening on a Blend If layer to lessen the extreme whites and blacks blowouts, and a hundred other formulas and tips and types. But what I said above is simple, safe sharpening and will suffice for quite a while, for most images.


Oh, and since this seems to be within your desires - barely - also take a look at PhotoKit Sharpener from PixelGenius. It's a lot like TLR Sharpeneing that John mentioned, but quite a bit simpler and more automatic. And it's "only" $100 which is a very bearable price tag. I do recommend TLR highly, but it takes a bit to get a handle on it. But for $0 you can't beat it.